Angela Williams had killed her partner of 23 years and the father of her two children with a pick axe and buried him in the backyard when she told his father he had disappeared, a court has heard.

"I told her not to tell me that," Milovan Dordevic said in a statement read to a Supreme Court jury during Ms Williams' murder trial.

"She [Ms Williams] told me that he was gone.

"She said that he had called her from Kiama [Mr Kally's favourite fishing spot in NSW].

"She told me that Doug asked her to come up as he had a house there.

"She said that she did not want to go there as she liked it where she was and that she had a house [at Indented Heads on the Bellarine Peninsula] and the kids were happy there."

Ms Williams, 45, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Doug Kally, 48, formerly known as Dragan Dordevic, in July 2008.

She admits killing Mr Kally by hitting him 16 times with a pick axe and later burying his body but claimed she had been acting in self-defence.

Ms Williams began a relationship with Mr Kally's best friend about two weeks after she killed him.

Mr Kally's body was found in a shallow grave wrapped in a tarpaulin more than four years later.

His brother, Alex Dordevic, told the court Mr Kally had been selling and using marijuana for years before he disappeared.

Mr Dordevic said he phoned Ms Williams on July 24, 2008, to ask if she had heard from Doug and she told him that "he'd got in his car, he took off and she didn't know where".

"She said that he took his phone book, little black phone book, and some clothing and that was it. He left everything else behind."

Mr Dordevic said Ms Williams never gave him an answer as to why Doug had left.

"She told me there was no argument, there was nothing ... just left, he just packed up and left."

Questioned by defence barrister Leonard Hartnett, Mr Dordevic said Doug had been taken to court for his drug dealing and then "all of a sudden he disappears".

"We don't know what happened to him. There might have been a gangster or someone that he used to get his marijuana from and so on. Someone could have been after him."

Mr Kally's sister, Elizabeth Dordevic, said Ms Williams told her about a month after Doug had disappeared that he had bought a house in Kiama but she did not want to join him because he had been abusive over the 23 years they had been together.

"I remember her saying that he burnt her with cigarette butt[s], like you can see it on her leg and just he was a violent person," Ms Dordevic said.

"But it is the first time I've heard her complaining about him being violent or anybody. The kids have never complained, no-one."

Mr Hartnett told the jury that the issue of family violence went to the heart of the case as Mr Kally had been terrorising Ms Williams and their two children for a number of years.